


a finale of sorts

by lugubrious



Series: rebelcaptain oneshots [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood, Death, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Les Mis AU, M/M, Violence, do NOT come here for a happy ending, kind of??? but only a little bit, no happy ending, this is short but i'm still proud of it, this is short sweet and SAD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 09:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10614258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lugubrious/pseuds/lugubrious
Summary: [rogue one + les mis]





	

**Author's Note:**

> god this is......so short but i hope you like it i'm really proud of it honestly

And then they die holding hands.

+

The sun is rising. Pushing from the world, with red and gold tendrils, the dark curtain of night. The interlude is over. The final act begins.

Enter – cast. On each face is painted the last words of Chirrut. Cassian can feel it stuck to his skin. If he were to drag his finger down his cheek it would come away damp. He doesn’t. He turns to the remains of his army. Because it is his, his and his friends. He, along with the other Rogues, had somehow sparked in these similarly painted faces a hope for change.

And now the battered bodies of his friends and his comrades shield against still more bullets. Flesh already riddled and broken is pierced again and again, occasionally a stray will tear through bone and break out the other side, ineffectual, smeared in gore. Baze stands above the human barricade, above the wooden barricade and roars. There is no fight without Chirrut because there is no future without Chirrut. Cassian grasps at the cloth of Baze’s coat in vain; the man springs across the line into enemy territory.

It’s a brief foray and ends within mere moments, but where Baze lies, many Stormtroopers lie around him. Like snow, and a dark, fallen branch. Another down.

‘In here!’ Bodhi calls. His face shines through the death-paint with almost uncharacteristic certainty, his doubt replaced, in these final moments, with utter belief for the cause. Deep inside, Cassian’s bones ache. He believes too, it lies in his blood vessels, in the gristle and marrow, he _exhales belief_ because what is there left, without it?

But he doesn’t want Bodhi to die.

He met Bodhi’s mother once. Briefly. She had his smile, but her gaze was steadier than her son’s. She’d looked straight through Cassian to the other side, and said,

‘Don’t get my son into any more trouble than he already manages by himself.’   

‘Cassian!’ Bodhi is yelling, gesturing towards the Inn. The Inn where Cassian took Tivik and shot him, mere hours before, because Tivik had killed an old man because an old man refused to join their fight. Cassian crosses the gap and enters the Inn. There they gathered, the last of them. There was no need for speeches.  All who were left lived the cause just as Cassian did. They had scarified all but their physical existences for the Rebellion, and now they were facing that final act. Cassian had never expected to live long. His death, as it draws closer, is as he had pictured it. In the haze where the skin of sleep has not yet been broken but the mind stirs beneath it, he has imagined this. Dying for his cause. Now that it is his reality, he is not surprised, nor regretful.

Jyn Erso’s presence, however, is unexpected.

She stands among them. Her face is dirty and painted like the others, in her hand she clutches a long stick. Her gun has been lost. Given to Kay some time before. The boy had taken the weapon and his eyes flickered between it and Jyn’s face. They were streaked, identically, with soot and earth.

‘You surprise me,’ Kay told her. His voice, even then, too big for his spindly body. Too adult. And then he died and suddenly he fit perfectly in his skin. Small, birds wing elbows, eyes closed. The first casualty. Of all of them, he had never pledged his allegiance to anything except Cassian. Of all of them, Kay had not been meant for death.

The Stormtroopers throw themselves against the door, re-enforced with rebel bodies. Bodhi and Melshi and Tonc press at the wood. Then gunfire spurts, rapid, and neither nature nor man survives. They slump where they stand, a final act of defiance.

Jyn is there; stick in hand.

Cassian watches her.

_You didn’t run,_ he almost says. _You never ran. Not for years._ And now she will be paid for her troubles with death by his side.

‘For the rebellion,’ she says roughly. Her voice tears at his side. He finds her hand.

Once she had muttered, like so many times before,

‘This will never work.’

‘Then why are you still here?’ Cassian had replied. The old argument. Jyn was slumped over the dark wooden table. By all rights she shouldn’t have been conscious, so much more of her was alcohol than blood.

And then she’d said, her voice shifting slowly past her lips;

‘There’s nowhere else. Nowhere. I don’t want to be anywhere else.’      

The next time they met, she hadn’t acknowledged those words, and Cassian hadn’t either. He’d assumed that, like the burn that sometimes seared through him in her gaze, it was nothings born of drink. But now –

Jyn meets his gaze. Her eyes scorch him, her hand is warm in his. He can see the fire licking through her under her skin. He doesn’t have time to say, _I’m sorry_ or _why didn’t you tell me?_ So he merely echoes her sentiment.

‘For the rebellion.’

The door bursts open.

Her grip tightens on him. Their first touch, skin-to-skin, is their last.

Bullets rip a hole in the world; the curtain falls.    


End file.
